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Usually when I watch long sequences from unreleased games I’m squinting, wearing my analytical face, trying to work out where the gap between hype and reality is most obvious, trying to see what might be true and what might be marketing. The E3 video of Metro: Last Light, just now released for wider consumption, is thirteen and a half minutes long and I didn’t squint once, I’m not even sure I blinked judging by the film of dust I’m now scraping out of my eyes. It looks and sounds absolutely stunning, and the wait until the Q1 2013 release suddenly seems extremely long indeed.

Here’s the context, which I read after watching the video because I’m an impatient little wretch.

In this sequence, Artyom is forced into an alliance with the young Red Line officer named Pavel as they attempt to cross the hostile surface of post-apocalyptic Moscow in a bid to reach the relative safety of the legendary station city, The Theatre.

115 Comments

I’m more excited for this game than any other I can think about. I just finished Metro for the first time last week, and I thought it was one of the best shooters I’ve ever played. I enjoyed it more consistently than Bioshock or Half-Life 2. Polis was a huge disappointment though.

It’s actually perfectly fitting. Those are nixie tubes, which were used in the sixties before proper digital displays existed, but the Soviets made them right on up to the 80s. Hell, you can still get Soviet-era Nixie tubes and make watches from them today. link to youtube.com

If I remember well, during an interview following that presentation, a question was asked about that guy. And apparently all these lines are here just to let people who don’t know the game or the context understand what’s happening. It should not be like that in the final version.

I know it doesn’t make up for the fact that they built the game that way, but playing the first one with Russian voices and English subtitles was much more immersive and meant you could just gloss over most of what the AI were babbling at you.

Except for the parts where, y’know, you had some fucking AI leading the way and blabbing incessantly into your ears. Or not even leading the way… just standing there and performing ‘exposition’, that you cannot escape from until they’ve finished talking and the door opens or whatever.

Ahh the bits people choose to forget when they talk about HL2. It’s up there with the repeated puzzles, near impossible prison siege bit and the occasionally rediculous scripting. I mean seriously, why does Gordon get in that coffin thing without any idea where it’s going?

I don’t think I’ve seen one game ever use PC footage expect BF3 because the game was actually designed for PC and ported to console. This game is def the traditional console then ported to PC like the first one.

I’m shocked to hear that. I liked Metro, but the FoV couldn’t have been wider than 55 degrees, I was assaulted by cutscenes and QTEs repeatedly, and the menus were incredibly simplistic. Felt very console-y to me.

I got a kind of mixed impression watching this video. First off, the graphics are incredible. Those outdoor scenes in particular were awesome.

I really like how they’re trying to implement all these little first person interaction bits (mostly just little animations), it makes your character feel more like an actual person. But that’s where my problem with what I saw came in to view. Those animations looked really “gamey”. You can see how wiping your mask and healing yourself in particular are done incredibly quickly, and that looks odd to me. I understand that it’s like that because it IS a game, and they want it to be FUN, but I think it’s at odds with the gameplay they’re trying to get across with this game (and 2033).

Still looks awesome, but I feel that this wont be one of those games to fully abandon the “mainstream” ideas that I think a lot of people are thinking it will.

Not sure if that’s some kind of New School Journalism style sarcasm or whether Adam simply failed to notice that around two thirds of that video were unskippable cutscenes and the rest was unashamed railroading.

Not sarcasm at all – if the whole game is railroading I’ll be miffed, but I thought that sequence was similar to watching the opening sequence of Half Life or Bioshock. A bit of tourism in a beautiful world gone wrong.

Sorry, but I failed to notice anything jaw-dropping about it either. From the looks of it, it’s just another run-of-the-mill shooter with slightly better than average graphics (at least judging from this low-bitrate 720p video) and seemingly dreadful voice acting. What is “absolutely stunning” about it? Please enlighten the uninitiated.

The graphics were fairly impressive but there were so many blatant invisible walls that any scale is arbitary and pointless. You could give me the most beautifully rendered setting but if I can’t go anywhere in it or interact with it then it really is just a wall paper. In those terms S.t.a.l.k.e.r is still much more impressive.

Very disapointed to see so much praise on RPS for what looks like yet another scripted shooter.

“You could give me the most beautifully rendered setting but if I can’t go anywhere in it or interact with it then it really is just a wall paper.”

So? Since when did setting and a sense of scale require you to actually be able to traverse those places? It still creates the desired affect, builds a sense of place. I mean if you don’t like linearity and want Stalker then that’s fine. Just feels like a bit of unfair criticism. Don’t think it was ever meant to be open-world?

What you want, then, is open-world games. Plenty of those around: Skyrim, Fallout, Just Cause. GTA etc. But complaining that Game X has invisible walls, when in fact it was never designed to be completely open-world and all linear FPS’ have some degree of invisible walls, is like me saying that Dishonored looks bad because it doesn’t have space combat. Even the greatest shooters (HL2, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Bioshock etc) had invisible walls, but it never bothered me any.

This looks pretty rad, though. I’m going to pick up Metro 2033 on Steam for $5 and see what all the hype is aboot.

It’s not about being open worldish, it’s about not being so linear that ruins the whole experience, the first game (Metro 2033) wasn’t that linear either, yeah it had it’s moments of forced cut scenes and scripted paths, but for the most part the levels themselves were pretty big, giving you the option to chose either to explore or to stick with the main pat, most of the time rewarding the player with side upgrades.

unfortunately this “trend” as become a main stay in this industry’s design mentality, problem is that it’s not natural for game design, for an experience to be natural it has to be controlled (fully) by the player, the “lame” way to program a game, and normally the most over used it’s to dish out cut scene upon cut scene for “cinematic” value, even though games are not movies and are quite capable to tell immersive stories in a different, not so forced way.

Oh and also try to tell me again on a straight face that Bioshock, Deus Ex and HL2 had invisible walls so that I can come over there to slap you, never, I mean NEVER, during my time with those games have I had a situation where there was an invisible wall in front of me, unless it served for progression purposes, Deus Ex Human Revolution is a great example actually, you can go anywhere in that map given you have the ability to do so.

Yeah. As far as scripted and linear FPS go, I prefer this over any recent COD game by far. Just because something is fairly scripted and linear doesn’t mean it’s bad. Sure it’s often done badly, but if this is anything like the original it should be fine.

My ‘problem’ with what I saw is not that it looked linear and scripted, but that it looked and played exactly like those very COD games you just dismissed. In fact, I don’t think I noticed anything unique about this game at all. Again, perhaps I’m just being ignorant about some jaw-dropping aspect of the game I failed to uncover, but so far my feeling of the game is that I’ve seen it all before in Fear, Darkness, Rage, and a myriad of other FPS clones.

As for the impressive sewer and junk pile visuals, I took another look at the graphics in another video, and I honestly can’t say what the brouhaha is all about. It looks good, but if it’s only about the eye candy, I can probably name a dozen of recent or upcoming shooters that look almost as good or perhaps even prettier—or grittier, or more realistic—than this.

All this boo hoo about scripted and linear…for godsake if done right they still make the best gaming experiences than a repetitive quests and sparsely populated open world boredom..

I’m more than happy to play an engaging linear at times scripted game experience. Sorry.

Open world is just that open…lots of open space..with towns or cities where no more than 20 people live…infact your lucky if a city has more than 15 houses in it.

I’m really looking forward to it. I’m sure it will be a thrill and far better than 99.999999% of any open world games that are due out or out. I’ll take open world games seriously when tech is powerful enough to actually fill that open world with something meaningful.

Again it’s not about being open world or not, it’s about being forcefully linear, so much so that it hurts the experience, you can’t have a natural immersion to the game when things happen because they are programed to happen, instead of being you the source around all that, again the first game was somewhat linear and had it’s shares of forced cut scenes, but for the most part it had some great levels which let you explore if you wanted to, if not then your playtime and significant value with the game would be much smaller than a guy who would get rewarded for doing the exact opposite of you, but hey if you like this awful “trend” in game design then go play Max Payne 3, I’ve heard the game it’s all about those things entirely.

Max Payne is way beyond the type of “scripting” in this video. At least Metro has scripted events that happen around your character, allowing you to maintain control while the event is happening. In Max Payne 3 the scripted events are all cut scenes. Cut scenes where Max is carrying a pistol, regardless of what weapon you have selected… resulting in Max switching to a pistol after the cutscene, with a big rifle in his left hand…even though he didn’t have that in the scene.

Anyway…. Metro 2033 was cool, but made me scared. This one looks scary too. I fear the amount of cash I will spend making it run smoothly on high settings.

I’m not going to fawn over the rest but I thought the cockpit cutscene was spectacularly well done. It captured the despair of not even having the comfort of “I’m going to die in a plane crash but at least the world will go on”. It’s “I’m going to die and so is everyone I love, everyone I know, and everyone I’ve ever met, even just once in passing”. I don’t know about anyone else but to me that’s really horrifying and I think that cutscene hit the tone perfectly.

This, there were plenty of scripted sequences in Metro. It’s just as linear and scripted as most other shooters of its kind – I’d put it on the level of something like Halo. Not sure why people are complaining about that in the sequel – Metro is not about being open-ended, it’s about the atmosphere, and that’s what sets it apart.

What, just because it’s Half-Life and it’s been eulogised by everyone, it suddenly makes it okay to have a long uninteractive section full of needless exposition? These asset tours are unconditionally the weakest part of any game, with no exceptions. It’s a shame that Half-Life popularised it by being otherwise good, and now these setpieces have become a clear sign of a game’s design bankruptcy.

I am always confused about why the tram ride is so fondly remembered. It was way too long, dull and had no surprises or hints as to what was going to happen. There were no cool back ground events or exciting glimpses of what’s to come. You don’t even get to see a before and after of what the place looked like before the incident because you barely see any of the places you later explore.

Besides it was done earlier and better in Super Metroid. Why was it better in Super Metroid? Because you could enjoy the atmosphere and lonliness or you could rush through to Ripley in about twenty seconds. In fact an alpha version of Doom had an opening where you walked through a military base with marines playing cards and watching hell spawn through the windows.

Well, i don’t remember the first one repeatedly stopping you. Besides, it did manage to immerse you so the railroading wasn’t so annoying. Hope they don’t force a companion on you for the whole game, though.

Few, if any, games hit ALL of these points – any sane person will acknowledge that it’s an unreasonable demand to make that a game fulfill that many (conflicting) objectives. Metro is good at creating an atmospheric game. The atmosphere is its defining characteristic. In order to make it more nonlinear some of that atmosphere would have to be sacrificed.

You say standards have declined. I say that people (sane people) recognize what games do well and praise them for it, even if some of their other elements are below average, rather than demanding impossible perfection.

TLDR: No game is perfect. If you don’t like admittedly linear/scripted games that have superb atmosphere, then METRO IS NOT THE GAME FOR YOU. Go back to playing your indie platformers (great depth and nonlinearity to be found there, for sure).

Of course there is no middle ground is there. You’re either a barely interactive movie or Skyrim. You’re not a banana? You must be an apple then.

You are vehemently defending, complete with personal insults, a 13 minute trailer which shows around 6 minutes of unskippable cutscenes. The remaining 7 minutes consisting of playing daddy’s footsteps with an AI drone down straight unbranching corridors fenced in by invisible walls. Is that something you really want to spend your time defending? Is that really the peak of video game design to you?

Hell it makes you wait for the AI drone to open the door for you. When is that acceptable?

This trailer is demoing the setting, not open-world nonlinear storytelling, so yes, this trailer is showing a highly scripted experience to hit all the high points at once. Pay attention to the sound design, the play of light and shadows, and how they introduce enemies. Look again at the section where you creep through the airplane and get hit with flashbacks. Listen to the comments of the NPC. This is introducing the world, both backstory and current situation, to the audience, and it does a masterful job of that. It also very effectively communicates how tense the gameplay can be, during those times when they leave the NPC to move off alone briefly in the ruins.

Now, stop all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that Metro: First Light is now just another CoD clone. It’s a ridiculous assertion to make based on one trailer whose intent is to communicate the lore and setting, and you’re making fools of yourselves by doing so.

What cutscenes? The only one I saw was the flashback showing how Moscow was destroyed and the plane crashed, and that was (on top of being atmospheric and required for setting the stage in a trailer) only about a minute long.

You really have to play the first game to understand why everyone is so excited about this.

The first was better than Half Life. There I said it. The atmosphere was incredible and it found the perfect balance between linear gameplay and giving the player choices. There are always branches that lead off to some deserted part of the Metro that you can choose to follow before you carry along the main path and there were even times when you had a Thief like choice with exactly how you would complete a section.

This is a perfect example of something being done so right that it goes right over certain people’s heads. Like spot on satire, half of the audience just will not get it.

Half of this trailer is not unskippable cut scenes. Not even close. 90% of this is someone actually playing the game with the occasional QTE thrown in. The flashbacks are interspersed with the action so you are still in control as the scenery changes to show the visions.

Also, can I just point out that you will not be with an AI companion for the entire game. The first one gave you just as many sections on your own as it did with someone at your side. Believe me when you’ve just scraped through yet another terrifying encounter with a pack of mutant dogs you will be overjoyed to have some company for a short while.

I absolutely cannot wait for this game. The first is a superb atmospheric shooter and this looks even better.

I have the first Metro. The atmosphere of the game is incredible.
It is so, .. east european… so different from what we normally get in games. It feels so real.
Also it is nerve wracking. At least to me… the horror elements, the darkness, the tunnels, the people living there…..
I had to stop playing all the time.

Game looks visually stunning, but yeah… as other commentators have pointed out:

THE CONSTANT CHATTER.

I remember it very much being a problem in the original Metro as well. I always clearly remember the section with the ghost/shadow/train that screams past you being ruined by your AI partner chatting all the way through, even going as far as to *explain what they were and why they were no threat*

So Metro never achieved that Stalker level of ‘what the hell is going on here?’-ness, because the NPC’s seemed to be tripping over each other to explain everything.

A shame. And a bigger shame for me to see the developers still don’t see it as an issue.

I did like the treatments on his voice, though. Made me feel more alone and the guy feel less significant, especially in the plane. I’m glad they kept it pretty silent (no music) when the demon grabbed Artyom, too — nice touch.

There were some definite wow moments in the video, but it feels a bit stilted, forced and predictable.

This was something. I had actual shivers from the vision Artyom gets in the plane…

But I hope some of those cinematic moments actually stem from your actions. Like when he searches the room and gets jumped by one of the monsters, that if he had actually looked carefully in the corner and shot the beast before getting the gun it wouldn’t happen.

I don’t mind the talking very much. That, however, depends on what the rest of the game is like. After being alone in a tunnel for extended amounts of time fearing for your life, it is sometimes nice to hear someone talking to you. When I played the last Metro I felt awful for great lengths. I enjoy this nerve wracking feeling to a certain extent but I need a break every once in a while. So the talking can be a good thing if there’s some every once in a while in the game to break up the terror.

Anyone else slightly disappointed that putting the gasmask on didn’t change your vision at all? Or am I being too pernickety at this stage in development? Having a little internal reflection or visual distortion would be aceness though.

The first gave a lot of impact, but maybe this being alpha footage and an E3 demo they kept it clean so meatheads wouldn’t complain about it.
By the way, didn’t the part where the spidery thing got on his face look really weird? It was like the gasmask screen was 50 cm away from his face.

In the first game your gasmask gets cracked as you get beat up by enemies, which causes it to be less effective and triggers a nice little air hissing out sound effect. It also gets frosted with condensation as the filter starts wearing out.

Looks nice, I gotta say though – it looks like they are either purposely panning the camera VERY slowly so it doesn’t stutter – or the game speed itself is REALLY slow. Seems kinda like the guy is panning in quicksand.

Bhazor, get your facts right please. Your constant rant on this article has been nothing short of trolling, as you’re immensely uninformed. This game, and NINETY FIVE FUCKING PERCENT of all other convention-showings of games are run on a PC, but played with a controller. Essentially falsifying how good a game’ll look on your console for one thing, but also because… Its not very good-looking sitting behind a desk with a keyboard and mouse on a stage. Also, please stop whining about it being linear. Its made to be linear, and the chatting from the NPC is simply for the demo, to explain “newcomers” about the game, the situations etc etc. So please, just please… Go away, uninformed brony-troll-ish-guy.

lol Who exactly is the real troll I wonder, a person who till now has placed his concerns about the sequel of a game that he/she might have loved and the future of game design in general or a guy who can’t coexist or correct the other person and instead all it does is disregard the value of his statements, oh and lets not forget the slander, I’m sorry but I’m gonna say you are the troll, don’t know how to deal with other people’s opinions then stay away from them, otherwise you will get backlashed with good reason. ;)

Oh and by the third and final time, the first game wasn’t that linear, for the most part it had some interesting level design with multiple layers of verticality, remember the Reds Vs Nazis level perhaps, and that’s wasn’t the only one, the same goes for the out door levels (most of them) and some metro sub stations as well.

Yeah, I remember 2033’s gasmask being very claustrophobic and blurry which greatly enhanced the immersion for me. I do like what they’re doing with the wiping mechanic and raindrop, blood, guts…etc effects on the mask.

As some one who is just getting to the end of playing 2033 on hardcore ranger in Russian (I’m not a great player but I’ve played this so much) I can say that this gave me a funny feeling in my willy.
And that my friends, at 47yrs old, is no bad thing.

Though I rather despise the very word “hardcore” in relation to playing games, Ranger Hardcore is how to play 2033, and I’m not (just) saying that to sound cool and awesomeleet-gamer-like.
-The game is indisputably and vastly improved by playing in Ranger mode.

Aside from the gasmask filter issues. I never played it on ranger hardcore save for the first levels, though i completed it on ranger easy (normal? how is it called?) and it was much better than the standard difficulties, i agree. Too bad the balancing was kinda off, so the tesla shotgun thingy could oneshot everything.

I too am largely baffled by all the fawning over this. Sure the setting was alluring and the engine is a wondrous thing to look at (its utterly appalling DX11 performance not withstanding) but the first game was utter toss. It is the least interactive game of recent memory, having far less actual play time ( as a percentage) then even the most heavily rail-roaded Modern Warfare clone. Add to that the appalling, dire voice acting, a laughable plot (that has slim connection to the book), impossible combat, idiotic AI (there was no AI, its all events) and a plethora of insta-deaths, coupled with the console-itis of bad controls and tiny FOV and I just don’t get it. Sure there was potential there but not much and this sequel shows no signs of them having learned from their first train wreck.

I recall reading a definition of sublime somewhere recently, I forget where, that its original meaning was “not beautiful, but awe inspiring”, such as a range of mountains, or an incredible feat of engineering.

Ok dude, I hope you are seeing this since the comment settings for this website are limited as all hell, this game is indeed following the steps of CoD, and hear me out because I only intend to say this once, from the nature of the gun play to the “cinematic” value it offers, all derivative of games such as CoD, why, accessible gun play with 0 weapon sway letting you spray and pray like no tomorrow, fast reloads (though they indeed slowed them a bit after the complaints they had during the E3 footage), waves upon waves of monsters, which did also happen in the first game but they were scarce, linear level design from the footage that was shown, and don’t give me the crap about the devs introducing the universe in this footage because the previous game play footage of last year’s E3 was just as shallow, with needless slow motion scenes, explosions and a mother fucking section where you had a damn mini gun, a mini gun, on a survival shooter.

Now I know this game is as half survival as it is half action but please, from everything I’ve seen so far they are indeed exploiting the franchise to become as well known as CoD, from the game play elements to the linear progression of the levels, they even are adding multi player for god’s sake.

And again, I might be wrong here, definitely hope I am though, but everything points out in one direction, now instead of trolling me with comments (you and everyone else that might oppose to this obvious fact) try to evaluate things on a objective manner, don’t elude yourselves of what this game can possibly become because lets be honest, putting games at such high regard never worked that well to start with.

I think people frame the debate incorrectly to make good/bad a function of linear/open in game design, but there could be an argument regarding homogeny/innovation: it’s not that linear is bad per se, but that the over-saturation of linear FPS games in the marketplace is stifling development because publishes jump to the incorrect conclusion that if a game does well the thing to do is simply repeat exactly the same process ad infinitum, because gamers are A.D.D. goldfish. That said, Metro 2033 is a GREAT linear, scripted FPS. Its setting, pacing, audio-visual feedback to the player promoting immersion, graphic design are all exemplary.

I agree completely; the ‘it’s linear so it’s shit’ comments are unconstructive

oversaturation is fine by me – there’s more games I want to play than I have time to, and if the linear FPS model throws up one great game every few years (HL, HL2, Doom3, CoD 4, Metro, this new Metro [crosses fingers]) that’s enough content to keep me satisfied

I liked Metro 2033 just as much as the next person, but why did it literally take over 10 minutes to get to a point where the player could actually aim and shoot something in a 13 and a half minute video?

I understand that atmosphere and tension need to be built up, but if you’re going to show me 13 minutes of footage in a game where the primary action is to shoot things, I expect to see much more shooting.

While I found the art direction and scale to be impressive, I’m not too sure about the claims in the article. Nothing here hasn’t been done before on a console port. I think at this point PC gamers would be impressed with a 3D engine that can render an organic world with no right angles in it’s silhouettes. Kudos for a small Russian studio to pull something of this scale off but… this is basically a cool console game running on a PC at higher resolutions. The first Crysis was technically more impressive – and that’s an open world game to boot.